OK…yesterday I talked about my half brother on my dad’s side. Today I will talk about my half sister on my mom’s side. This story will take a bit longer to tell. My mom was first married to a man named Morris. The reason I’m sharing his name is because the name is just hilarious. I used to have a t-shirt with Morris the cat on it, and whenever I wore it, it would make me think of my mom’s first husband. He is dead now. My mom found out a few years ago that he had been dead awhile and she said, “Oh.” It was so weird to me that she was once married and in love with this man, and had a child with him and then years and a life-time later she didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. Together they had a daughter I will call W. All I know about Morris is that he was a “liar” and she never really loved him. Fair enough.
Then she married another guy who I will call E. All I know about E is that she was only married to him for a few months, he was an alcoholic, and then he died. Hmmm. Ok. Kind of odd. We only found out about him after scrounging through drawers one night that my sister was babysitting me. We came across a photo of my mom in a newspaper with a really weird last name that we didn’t recognize. Then we confronted her about it. That’s when she seemed upset and told us the shortened version of their “marriage.”
So then my mom married my dad. My mom’s daughter, W, wanted to finish up high school with my mom’s mom (Grandma). So my mom and dad moved to the cities and W stayed on the farm with Grandma. Apparently, my mom and W never got along very well. This is hard for me to understand since my mom and I are very close.
When W was 16 she went to a picnic with friends, on her horse. Her horse’s name was Peanut. Well one of her drunken friends wanted to ride Peanut but he scared the horse and the horse took off running. W hitched a ride with friends in a car to go find her horse. The seen they came upon mere minutes later was one that I can only imagine as “horrific.” Her horse had been hit by a truck and died on the side of the road. The driver of the truck was rushed to a hospital with injuries unknown. W and a few friends decided to go to the hospital to see if the driver would be ok. It turns out he would live.
On their way home from the hospital, the driver of the car W was in had been drinking too, and he hit another car head on. Both drivers were killed instantly. Is this day bad or what? W was thrown from the car but lived. The others in the car survived as well. But maybe W would have been better off if she had died that day too. She has severe brain damage. She was in a coma for 3 months. They didn’t even set her broken leg because they didn’t expect her to live, so one leg is 3 inches shorter then the other. Her long-term memory is in tact but she basically doesn’t have a short-term memory.
I only see her about once a year when my mom and I go to the “home” she lives in and bring her birthday presents in November. She smells. She doesn’t brush her teeth (and god knows why no one else there does) so they are rotten. My mom tells them over and over to get her teeth fixed but she has little control now that W is a ward of the state. W keeps rotten apples in her purse and offers you gum that appears to be 3 years old, that snaps when you accept it. The thing that is hard is that W doesn’t even remember we were there. That is, I think, why the visits from my mom have dwindled down to once per year.
W will still talk about the dog my mom had when W was little, or she will talk about Gramma and Grampa like they aren’t dead. She just doesn’t have a clue. And, it’s really sad. I think a lot about “what could have been.” She was so beautiful as a teen, with long straight brown hair. She was a VERY talented artist and she taught herself how to play the guitar fluently. I like to think she and my sister and I would all be sort of close. She would probably be married with kids of her own and those little “ghost children who will never come to be” would be so cute and fun and full of life.
There have been some crazy stories about her over the years. She had a “boyfriend” at one time who was basically a pedofile criminal who kidnapped her from her “handicap home”. They ran off and got married and she was eventually found living with him in a van with 3 cats. He was obviously arrested. Anyway, it’s just a sad life full of so many “what ifs” and I try not to think about her too often. She is in her late 50’s now.
I still have a few boxes full of her things from high school: a diary with typical teenage rumors and gossip, a bunch of horse riding ribbons, goddy jewelry that she loved, yearbooks, photos of her dad, photos of her as a baby, a toddler, a child, and a teen…a life that was never really lived, all stored in 3 boxes in my basement. Oh, W, how your life could have been…so very beautiful.
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